Georgia Karagiorgi and Matt Toups want to build a giant, super-intense laser with a 100-kilometer beamline to detect "relic neutrinos" from 14 billion years ago. This cosmic neutrino spectrometer could some day explain how the universe evolved two or thee seconds after the big bang.
Such big ideas are exactly they type of innovative, enthusiastic thinking Fermilab scientists want to stir in upcoming researchers.
The pair of Columbia University students received a first place award at the User's Meeting in June for their unique proposal in a neutrino experimental challenge held at Fermilab last year during a 10-day Neutrino Physics Summer School.
"It was so much fun," Karagiorgi says. "And, it was just in the spirit of the school. Matt and I took what we learned in the lectures and applied it to our projects."
The contest was one of the many activities designed to get students thinking about future experiments for neutrinos, a growing focus of research, particularly in the United States. Students were discouraged from letting today's resource constraints limit their ideas.
"We have so many questions. What caused matter to dominate antimatter? Neutrinos are fundamental constituents of the universe. They pass through our bodies at the rate of trillions per second. We should probably know a little more about them," says Gina Ramieka, the school's co-director and head of Fermilab's neutrino department.
The biannual school, one of few in existence, offers college students the opportunity to discuss and hear lectures from leading neutrino physicists. Fermilab's school incorporates neutrino research conducted in the sky, underground, in reactors, and with accelerators.
"There is a danger in getting too narrow in this subject, so we wanted to keep everything very broad," Ramieka says. "You can't do all of particle physics in a single experiment. There are many tools you have to use to get to the fundamentals."
By Jennifer L. Johnson
